Many contractors lower their chances of winning government contracts because they fail to follow a repeatably successful proposal development process; even when they win a contract, they wonder if it was worth the time and effort they put into the sales stage.
To optimize your proposal process, remove the mystery from it by focusing on three key areas: team roles and responsibilities; compliance; and time savings.
Developing government pricing proposals requires extensive work due to the data and reporting requirements. You may feel ready to face your prospect when you gather your cost data, but we recommend nailing down your proposal process using a checklist.
Computerized spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel are great for quickly and accurately manipulating large amounts of numerical data. Embedding such spreadsheets with formulas that reflect a company's costing methodologies can allow an enterprise to rapidly generate pricing figures for the business proposals and RFP responses they need to secure new customers. However, as a business grows, such "homegrown" pricing tools often become problematic. When this happens, a new solution much be found.
There might be some 26.5 million businesses in the U.S. -- 99.7% of which are businesses with fewer than 500 employees -- but how many of these can manage to win government contracts, do you think?
When responding to a Request For Proposal (RFP), it's essential you pay close attention to your business proposal format. Submitting your proposal in the required format can mean the difference between winning a contract and failing an otherwise ideal bid.
Did you know that, according to Entrepreneur, the federal government awards contracts worth $500 billion every year? You might also not know that the law requires the government to send at least 23% of these contracts -- nearly one in four -- to small businesses, a category which the vast majority of businesses falls under. In fact, of the some 26.5 million U.S. businesses, a staggering 95% have less than 500 employees, qualifying them as a small business, according to the Small Business Administration.
Because the government inherently creates no real products or services themselves, they must constantly procure things they need from one of the millions of businesses in the United States. The way businesses do this is by bidding on government contracts by submitting a proposal in response to an RFP.
There are approximately 26.5 million businesses in the U.S. and the vast majority (99.7%) employ less than 500 people. Businesses respond to Request for Proposals (RFP) every day to win lucrative government contracts, but bidding on government contracts can be competitive.
